Of this entire canvas, we have selected to colonize the worst of it. We will land in the cold north. It is the most defensible region by far.
Architectural patterns on the surface reveal that Grigory IV has hosted at least five waves of settlement from vastly different space-faring species. Extensive city grids cover the continent, but these ruins are overgrown and reclaimed by nature, visible only from space.
Isolated communities of these alien races yet persist at the edges of the continent. They are too primitive to thrive, too small to expand, and yet too large to die off. These communities may only exist because they are insulated from the rest of the continent by water, by mountains, or by other natural features.
Though the dominant race on Grigory IV is human, we are not rejoicing. As it turns out, we uncovered more than simple barbarism. We have discovered a twisted world.
Grigory IV has been poisoned.
Something awful has been done to the poor humans on the ground. Something that subverts any attempt at true civilization. In the distant past, some advanced space-faring race played god with these humans. They re-sequenced the genetics to fill some temporary need, probably for a fast-growing and adaptable military, and then abandoned them to languish on the planet’s surface, reasons unknown.
Poisoned worlds are not common, and we know them mainly from lore. Our forebears passed them by and left them festering in space. They cannot be conquered, they cannot be civilized. They can only be avoided.
Yet this is our new home. We failed to re-light our drive engines. They are beyond recovery, and so are we. Our ark-ships have tiny maneuvering jets, plasma rockets for terrestrial landings, and nothing else. We have no choice but to continue our task and claim Grigory IV for the Haphan empire. Publicly, the Fleet Commander asserts that Grigory IV is an imperial burden.
Optics place the prevailing technology level at low medieval, so we will attempt civilize the world with our advanced weaponry. When we have it settled, we will keep it under close control for our own protection. The colonization committee has created a Department of Indigenous Affairs which will assume the role of invigilation (we cannot call it spying). Indigenous Affairs will monitor the native culture, remove the savants, organizers, and other trouble-makers, and protect the Haphan civilization from harm.
It required only minutes for parliament to agree that our current defense force is insufficient for the threats it will face. Therefore, every man and woman under twenty has been drafted into military service. The training is difficult and the youth are quite unwilling. There was more outcry when our auto factories, long dormant in the ark ships, began the orchestrated shift to munitions production. We will have fewer conveniences and more guns; fewer universities and more military bases. Many colonists, willfully blind to our peril, launched violent protests over these measures.
One of the ships in our convoy went into outright mutiny. The Fleet Commander opened their population wheel to space using remote instructions to the thinking machine. We were close enough to watch it unfold. The tremendous ark-ship blurred with a haze of debris, the bodies of hundreds of thousands of colonists, sucked into the void. Some families still held hands. The ship’s thinking machine went mad as its humans died in the vacuum, it filled every radio band with its song of forsaking, frustrated and sad and haunting. Rather than be an empty city on the planet’s surface, it dumped its cores and allowed the ship to nova.
I think these are just the beginning of our troubles. We are a half million miles from Grigory IV, and already the planet has us murdering each other like savages.
(Three months to Landing Day.)
Grigory IV’s inhabitants are locked in a static circular mania of birth and murder. Now that we are in low orbit and ready to descend, new, discouraging information is brought to light almost daily. The Fleet Commander herself is irritable and disaffected. She disappears for days in the engine module on “camping trips.” She leaves her communicator on her desk.
Listening chaff dropped onto the planet have recorded the indigenous language so we will be able to communicate. We have detected only one extant language and fragments of an earlier tongue. The primary language has only minor variation across the continent, even though language in primitive cultures tends to fragment along geographic lines. We believe this lingual coherence is an effect of the twisting.
We see little evidence of a functional social memory except among the females, who use their knowledge to exert control over the males. Influential women are kept safe from violence, and they often assume leadership over communities.
The natives call themselves Tachba. They are human-standard, with notable exceptions. Highly fertile women bear two to three female children, and four to eight pairs of male children—often from a single impregnation that supplies a lifetime of children. Male deposits are kept viable for years in a special organ our xenobiologists named the “spermatozoal magazine.”
Our anthropologists tell us there are good reasons for the vastly differential birthrates. The males are excitable, and do not reach rational maturity until well into adulthood. Males under thirteen years of age enjoy a seventy-five percent mortality rate through misadventure.
Our sociologists warn that on the surface of Grigory IV, night is the most dangerous time. This is when the impulsive young men go hunting. In our recordings, they claim to hear voices and whispers. They claim to be “called into the dark by the woodland creatures” and other nonsense. They sneak away while the rest of the family pretends not to notice, and they hunt the forests with other youths from their homesteads or settlements. Inevitably they cross paths with other groups of boys. Bloodshed follows. The hunt and the mayhem is called “night song.”
We have observed some settlements which are too near each other. Between them are fields where a plow cannot be drawn, they are so full of generations of dead. Their bones form interlocking strata impervious to any agricultural invention, and the land is only good for grazing.
We must be wary of Tachba in the forest. We must be wary of Tachba at night. We must be wary of Tachba in groups. Above all, we must be wary of young Tachba.
Yet, their malicious genetics are not their fault, and when we look past their twisting we find ourselves admiring the Tachba. They are hard-working. They adapt easily to what a civilized Haphan would deem drudgery. They thrive in strong multi-family groups. Certainly they are twisted and dangerous—but when the twisting causes them to err, which is often, they feel regret.
Happily, when morality speaks, the Tachba are of a listenable nature. We can use this to manipulate them.
(Childhood: Displays of Threat)
Young Nana
It was the day Nana brought the killcrack home. She had wanted to engineer something magical for Papa, a surprise that would win her the independence of a pharmacienne so she could openly leave the family compound. Instead, her appearance had immediately devolved into a fight at the front gate. Grueff shot at her brother Gole, and Gole’s flung knife barely missed Papa’s head.
The knife was still thrumming in the wooden palisade when Papa bellowed: “Stop! Guns down!”
Grueff had regained his balance but couldn’t stop a cruel kick to Gole’s ribs that sent the boy skidding through the dirt. Gole gasped for air, his face a mask of blood.
“Stopped,” Japha said, hands out.
“Stop-meh,” said Jaja.
“Stopped.” Grueff straightened with a groan.
Gole bubbled quietly on the ground. Nana stared, appalled, too stunned to move.
“I’m fine,” Gole finally muttered. “I’m fine. Grueff hits hard, is all.”
“Which your fucking son tried to stab me,” Grueff said.
Papa spun on Gole. “True?”
“They had Nana cornered with guns and bared blades.”
Papa turned back. “Grueff, is that true?”
A horde of boys now followed Papa through the gate, with Momma and the other women not far behind. It looked like Nana had rou
sed the entire compound.
“I was showing Japha what a guard does,” Grueff said. “Nana returns from the forest without an escort. You don’t flirt with her. You check to see if she still has her wits. La, you see if she can speak! Then you prepare for whatever follows her out of the forest. This is all down to your baby witch.”
Papa pulsed a moment, and then palpably forced himself to relax.
“Nana, of course.” He turned to her, his voice even. “So your mischief commences. What do you have for us?”
Nana stared voicelessly, still trying to catch up. Her little brother Gole had attacked Grueff. Guns fired. A knife flung. It had happened in seconds.
These violent fools. These imbeciles, rolling in the dirt. Gole nearly getting himself killed, after all the work she put into him! It was pure pollution. None of them would see the lunacy. None of them could imagine ten seconds into the future.
They’d almost killed her brother! Her brother had almost killed Jaja!
“Nana!” Papa snapped. “What do you have to say?”
She jerked awake.
“Nothing,” she said. “Very little.”
“Which one?” he demanded. “Which one is worth Gole being killed at the gate on your behalf?”
“I…I was in the woods, Papa.”
“Yes.” Grimly.
“I was mothering…”
Papa rode over her quavering voice. “Don’t pour me your regular shit soup, girl. You almost got your brother killed.”
Nana had nothing. In a small voice, she said, “I only wanted to say Naremsa house is blessed.”
“We were blessed until today, you mean, and then you pulled this stunt.” Papa pointed a finger at the forest beyond the fields. “Nana, a girl out there alone is fodder for trouble. Death from a thousand causes, a thousand-and-one if the world is feeling clever. Not that we’d mourn some useless slight girl without the wits to stay behind a wall. The real problem is when the slight girl gets boys killed on her behalf. We have no use for a manleader here.”
She’d never heard that word from Papa’s mouth, manleader.
He didn’t let her answer. He said, “If I ever miss you from this house again, I will cane you to within an inch of your life. And then I’ll measure that last inch very closely to see what it’s worth.”
It was mild as Papa’s rebukes went, but the men watched hungrily. Even Gole couldn’t keep from glancing her way as he unavoidably considered the pain that might become hers.
Papa turned to go.
Nana finally found her voice. “I cannot accept that rule, old man.”
Papa swung back, eyes wide. “Say that again.”
“I’ll leave when I need, and go where I will,” Nana said.
“Thinkst thou that I cannot shatter a slight girl?” Papa wrenched the spear out of Japha’s hand and turned the butt toward her. “Thinkst I cannot break my own heart?”
She had seen Papa reverse a spear: The next few seconds would give her a broken leg. The only problem was she was slight, not a pure Tachba, and certainly not a Tachba boy. She would not knit after a week of forced inactivity. Really, she didn’t know if she would heal at all.
Nana flushed with a sudden, cold clarity. There was only one outcome for today, and she’d known it from the moment she walked up to the gate. The day was her test, and she had to win through somehow. She had nothing with which to fight. She was weak, slow, and altogether too sensible compared to the men. Worse, she had no weapons to make up those weaknesses. She had nothing but her wits…
Wrong.
She had more than her wits. She had a new little…child. Her child needed protection. Zsalft—Soft—was fresh from its cocoon, frightened, and almost as wild as her brothers. The little horror would not last a day in the forest without her…
Soft would not last a day, and Nana would not last her life, unless she earned them both. She wasn’t without a weapon. Purpose was her weapon.
Nana passed a hand over her chest, as if to cup her breast. The motion was not lost on the men. The conditioning that began from the cradle focused their attention for a moment.
Then, when they realized how she had played them and were just turning angry, she braced with the mudra of the Conveyant Queen.
The men went still.
Behind the gathered families, Momma’s mouth dropped open. The women shook their heads.
Before the man-lock could falter, she cried, in Deep Tongue, “This is my voice: hear it. I bring news of joy. Blessed are Naremsa.”
“So you’ve claimed.” Papa spoke through gritted teeth.
She showed him the Closed Eye Opening. “Think small. See me with your quiet mind.”
Nana had hoped to knock him into thoughtfulness, but Papa was too old to be so easily bid. She knew by his eyes that she was only making her punishment worse.
“I will not move,” Nana said softly.
“Thou wilt,” Papa said tightly, still struggling.
“I refuse to move,” she repeated, more for herself. “I refuse to move.”
Nana stuck out her leg, daring him to break the shaft of the spear over it. Certainly it was bravado. It was a direct challenge and very unlike Nana. The thoughtful version of Papa would have registered the strangeness of it. It would have given him a moment’s pause. This time, it didn’t. Papa was too angry, too distracted as he shivered himself free of the man-lock.
He raised his spear and stepped forward.
Nana played her final card. She tossed her head to clear the hair from her face.
Under her hair, a creature stirred.
All through the raised voices, the brief fight, and then Papa’s bellowing, Soft had clenched Nana’s skull with growing anxiety.
When she tossed her head, the sweet little vicious killkrack finally lost its temper.
It scrambled out of her hair to complain. In the open air, it saw the huge, angry man with the long stick.
It went mad.
Soft clawed up the side of Nana’s face, spitting like a tea-kettle. Its needle-sharp claws clamped her throat like climbing spikes. It spread its neck-sack and clawed the air with three little arms. The killkrack’s vestigial wing membranes, gruesomely small and damp, opened with a bloody spatter from their cavities and vibrated in the air like torn paper.
Papa leapt back with a cry, followed by Grueff. Jaja pulled Japha the other direction. Gole simply froze in place, unable to shift his gaze from the hideous creature that had replaced his sister’s face and then turned its body inside out.
Nana refused to flinch. Soft crawled up her scalp and renewed its threat display. Blood trickled down her face from her forehead.
“Killkrack!” Jaja exclaimed euphorically.
“Yes, it is!” Papa screamed. “That’s a killkrack by fuck. A killkrack on Nana’s face, whew! Ha-ha! That’s a trick!”
Momma finally spoke. “Husband,” she said calmly, “you are too excited.”
“That’s a blighted reptile insect on your daughter’s head!” Papa shouted.
“Hysterics are pointless.”
“Hysterics? Hysterics! Whistle it down, Nana.”
Nana held herself unearthly still. “Zsalft is my friend from the forest, Papa. So you know I can take care of myself.”
“It’s a killkrack!” Papa reversed the spear in his hand so the tip faced forward.
“Zsalft can’t be hurt,” Nana said. “Do not stick him. What would you bring down on this house if you killed Zsalft?”
“The killkrack is only Nana’s pet, Nophalon.” Momma’s voice remained calm, soothing, and Nana realized she was also leveraging her control over him. “The little queen has only surprised us, as you always hoped she would.”
“A pet,” Papa said. He paced a circle, noticed what he was doing, and stopped. “A pet! This is what you’ve brought us. A pet from your hair.”
Gole broke out with a peal of laughter. “Good one, Nana! Next time, why don’t you make Papa shit bricks?”
With that
, the tension disappeared. The boys gathered around Nana and the killkrack. Their curiosity made a barrier between her and Papa. She watched Momma guide him to the side and settle him with a hand on his cheek.
Nana had made it through the moment, but she was not sure she had won.
The boys enclosed her in a tight, tentative circle and got their first protracted look at an elusive creature. Then they wished they hadn’t. It was a scribble of crossed feather-quills, bloody wings, sharp claws, and snapping teeth. Nana’s white-blonde hair wrapped every spiky protrusion, and seemed to move on its own like a living cowl.
Soft slowly calmed under the awe of the boys. Between threat displays, it hummed with pleasure against her skull, as if it had found its proper element in their reverence.
Nana’s attention was elsewhere, though, following Papa back into the compound. Of all the people in Nana’s world, Papa should have been the most proud of what she’d done. Yet even though he’d expected her ‘mischief’ to commence, he wasn’t immune to it by any measure.
A surprise from a slight girl could change a mind, couldn’t it? It could open a new path. It could humiliate a proud man.
She thought, These people…if you can surprise them, you can very well own them.
Nana had thought she’d be lucky to be a pharmacienne, so she could finish her life collecting herbs, tanning leather, and mixing glue. Now she knew she could be a dashta. She would gather her talents, practice her skills, and never again lose control of a situation as she had today.
If she was a very good dashta, she could do more than simply cause and then defuse fights in front of the gate. In the back of her mind, a quiet voice whispered manleader.
Papa didn’t speak to Nana for a week, until one night pride finally won out against pride. He called her to the fire and pointed to her chair. She sat.
The Eternal Front: A Lines of Thunder Novel (Lines of Thunder Universe) Page 16
